Since the election of 45, the worlds of tech and politics have collided. Between tech leaders at Google, Facebook and other tech companies speaking out against 45’s executive order on immigration and, more recently, those same companies speaking out against the 45 administration rescinding guidance for transgender students in public schools, it’s clear that the tech industry is… Read More
While so many virtual reality hardware companies have been tasked only with selling their own product, Oculus has had the intense challenge of building the entire industry’s ecosystem for the last several years. That growth has come with some hiccups by way of lawsuits, product launch delays and executive shakeups, but Oculus is still very much alive and well. Read More
Scorp, a startup out of Turkey, offers another take on the social video theme. The app lets you upload 15-second videos on any topic, such as your view on Trump’s immigration controls. In fact, its young makers call Scorp the video answer to Reddit or Quora. Read More
In the market for online education, Udacity remains focused on teaching its students about software development, data science and machine learning. To this avail, Udacity brought out its M&A team for the first time to strategically acquire CloudLabs, a small shop building interactive coding environments that let groups collaboratively code from within their browsers. Read More
Microsoft previously let us know that a range of its OEM partners with familiar names from the PC world would be building headsets that offer mixed reality experiences on Windows 10 hardware. The first of those, from Acer, will begin shipping out to developers this month, with a phased rollout that will see developer edition headsets continue to arrive at partner doorsteps throughout the next… Read More
Congress could chalk up a quick, easy bipartisan victory for taxpayers if both the House and Senate determined to pass the Email Privacy Act as early as possible, and send it to President Trump for signature. Read More
Snap will begin publicly trading tomorrow, which means that it will officially give a price for its shares in its initial public offering this evening. Originally setting a range between $14 and $16, the company set its own valuation lower than what tech observers might have expected, given the hype of the first big tech IPO of 2017. Read More
It’s hard to be a tutor. For one thing, many educators don’t have time for extracurricular teaching, even while they might need to bolster their paychecks. Most schools prohibit teachers from tutoring children in the school systems in which they work, too, making it difficult to connect with families needing help. Read More
The Craig Newmark Foundation just annoucned that it has donated $1 million to ProPublica. The foundation says that Newmark (either personally or through the foundation) made multiple millions of dollars worth of donations to media-related organizations last year, including giving $1 million to The Poynter Institute to fund a faculty chair in journalism ethics. Newmark recently told… Read More
Facebook and Oculus are looking to make their brand of high-end virtual reality considerably more affordable with a price slash coming to its Rift headset and Touch motion controllers. Read More
Intel lost the last battle for smartphones. In May, the company quietly announced that it was canceling plans for its Broxton mobile processor, effectively acknowledging that it couldn’t compete with Qualcomm and in-house chips from powerhouses like Apple and Samsung. But the war is far from over. Read More
Tech companies are terrible at tempering expectations. Really, really bad. Take last month, when Qualcomm CEO Stephen Mollenkopf told the audience at his CES keynote, “5G will have an impact similar to the introduction of electricity or the automobile, affecting entire economies and benefiting entire societies.” That’s a pretty damn high bar. Read More
GitHub is expanding its offering for large companies today. The service, which allows developers to more effectively collaborate and share their source code, already offered an enterprise version of its tools that large companies could host in their own data centers, AWS or Azure. Now, it is launching a new hosted service of GitHub that, just like the enterprise version, will cost $21 per… Read More
United Launch Alliance launched an Atlas V rocket Wednesday, successfully kicking things off at the planned launch time of 12:49 PM ET. The launch put a satellite into space – but the satellite’s specific details and mission are secret, since it’s a classified piece of hardware run by the National Reconnaissance Office. You can re-watch the launch above. ULA declared… Read More
Style transfer app Prisma is adding another couple of new features as it works to keep its community engaged: a styles store and a tool that lets users create their own styles by uploading an image and tweaking various filters. Read More
Spotify is thinking about introducing a new paid option in addition to the existing Spotify Premium subscription called Spotify Hi-Fi. For an extra $5 to $10, you could get all the features in Spotify Premium as well as lossless high fidelity streaming. There could also be a couple of new features. The Verge first spotted that the company has been doing tests on its mobile app. There are… Read More
Life sciences startups need a whole lot more cash than most and that’s certainly true for GRAIL, a cancer detection startup trying to figure out a way to find the “emperor of all maladies” much earlier through blood testing technology. The startup, which spun out of genomics company Illumina announced it has closed a whopping $900 million in Series B funding this morning.… Read More
Baidu Ventures exists on the front-lines of the Chinese search giant‘s push to brand itself as an artificial intelligence company. In an effort to bridge the AI ecosystems of China and the United States, Baidu Ventures is partnering with Comet Labs, a San Francisco-based fund specializing in machine intelligence. Unlike other venture capital firms looking to diversify into AI, Comet… Read More
Google rolled out a series of new tools for Android game developers at GDC in San Francisco this week that offer new ways to entice users to download their games, as well as ways to make more money from the games and track how users are interacting with their titles.
One of the more notable launches is something Google is calling “playables,” which, as the name implies, is an… Read More
Nearly 80% percent of American adults have smartphones these days, according to Pew Research. And the kids are catching up, studies from the Kaiser Family Foundation suggest. Now, an education tech startup called Nearpod has raised $21 million in venture funding to help teachers turn mobile devices into a positive force for learning in the classroom, rather than a distraction they must… Read More
